Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people's agency.

Monica Flegel is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University, Canada. Her research focuses on cultural studies, specifically addressing children, animals, and pop culture and fandom. She is the author of Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015).

Christopher Parkes is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University, Canada. His research focuses on children's literature. He is the author of Children's Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850-1914 (Palgrave, 2012).  His current research focuses on YA fiction and the end of social mobility in America.